


Witnesses of the Queen's voyage

by laughingpineapple



Category: Shadow of the Colossus
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-20
Updated: 2013-12-20
Packaged: 2018-01-05 08:02:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1091539
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laughingpineapple/pseuds/laughingpineapple
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A power breaks free and travels north. Few take notice. [SotC to ICO]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Witnesses of the Queen's voyage

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mesonyx](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mesonyx/gifts).



> Hello hello and merry Yuletide! I hope you have a great day!  
> Two notes so things don't get confusing: as per your letter and as a day-1 huge fan of both games, I tried my hand at a crossover. Dormin's female voice, the horns, the shadows... so many things that can fit and canon is delightfully vague. But! According to the amazing artwork released with the PS3 ports, the castle and the shrine of worship aren't one and the same (it would've been so cool to include the MIDDLE PART OF THAT DAMN PICTURE in the fic, BUT you... know... *baby griffin wailing*)  
> And, while Quadratus' arena is on a beach, the waterfalls beyond it look nasty... if I remember my explorations correctly, the one place in all the Ancient Land where one could plausibly build a raft and just get the hell out is the secret beach in B5, accessible from Dirge's arena. So there's that. :)

**Dirge**

The corpse is inert stone. Its black tendrils are long dormant, drained by the cavern's hungry sands. The dead take no heed when a young boy of ten winters (there is no snow in this land, its discreet stasis would not bear the weight, but it knows winter. Fruit is scarce, lichens tell of rime) breaks the sanctity of its resting place, rushing to catch the sunset in search of far-off memories of the ocean.

A pebble drops.

The boy comes back and he is not alone. The dead take notice – the dead cannot see nor feel nor think, or they would rank among the living still, in the calm collected ways of stone and moss, but the dead can resonate. It is in their nature to be a sounding board for lives to come, so the corpse takes in the tolls of power coming from deep within the boy's companion. The woman sits on its remains, deep into the cavern's shadows, wary of the spot of sunlight gushing from a breach – outside is full of sunlight, she needs the cave, she needs the depth, she cannot see the layers of walls and walls inside her, every gate fastened with the tightest seals, but the tolls seep through. The dead provide an echo.

 

The boy's feet are steady on the rocky path down the cliff. His feet are bare, he does not feel the stones. Soon, he is back.

 

“Open sea”, he tells her, blessing her forehead with three fingers wet with salty water. “Mono! We can go.”

The woman tilts her head. Black tendrils shake. She finds coarse words to explain – three fingers wet trailing a circle, the old ward from diseases of the soul. The boy has been a hunter all his lives, he could not know, and yet.

Her feet draw in the sand. Their whole land is a circle skimmed by waters. A seal protects the outside as well as the inside.

 

A pebble drops. Its echoes push toward the surface.

The dead take notice and go back to dull void.

 

 

 

**Drops**

This land will be cleansed and brought back to the ocean. It is a fixed point in its future, a wrap on the tireless bustling of lizards and turtles, predicted by the stern cries of hawks above.

Erosion comes slow. It opens a path for purification, which must reach even deeper.

 

The woman's pilgrimages have become frequent, as the boy once again turns into a man and can be left alone to take care of their refuge. This is their opinion – the whole land is their refuge, there is no danger here. They could call each other from the mountain slopes to the cliffs and the wind would eventually carry their conversation, but they felt a human need for closeness. Then the other need, the one to leave, that just as human. They cherish their human nature – most of the time. So they leave, never together, as they seek different absolutions. It is the only time of the year they are apart.

The woman seeks discourse with the stone: there is a labyrinth inside her that is filled with smoke, and a looming distant figure that looks nothing like the corpses she sits under, unless she squints. Monsters know monsters, if nothing more. Rain follows her footsteps. It taps on her shoulders, washes her feet. When she turns, she never sees the black stringy trail she leaves behind – it has already been pushed into the earth. The labyrinth's corridors shift with each visit; as an opening comes into view, it reveals a steep coastline bathed in sunlight, and a tiny sail being pushed to the north.

This coming and going within the land's borders has been the present of the woman, the man, the rain, up until this evening with the three of them falling on the thin white sand of the beach, close to a raft heavy with food water and doubts.

“We leave in the morning.”

The woman nods. A pebble drops. The cliff bears echoes of landslide.

 

The raindrops dig into her skin. The labyrinth's outer wall protects the smoke beneath.

As light falls and the two retreat into the safety of the cave, seeking shelter among the chattering of bats, the storm's front falls back beyond the coast. It will tell the ocean of its failure.

 

 

 

**Borders**

Theirs are empty talks. There is salt in their ears and no echo at sea, so that the sounds coming from their tongues are dispersed with no obstacles to keep them close. The cliffs far to their right are impervious and sharp, arising from the waters as they sail, every new peak just beyond the horizon, to protect their bodies lathed in solitude and nothingness from the raw bustling of the inhabited mainland. Or if it is protection that they offer, their allegiance could lie with the earth itself, who had secluded its shadows in a peninsula at the bleak end of the world and thought that walls of rock and stone could contain the infection.

The rain has ceased its pursuit. The fugitives do what fishermen do, and the fishes do not ask why the creature reeling them in to their death has horns, nor what shadows protect his companion's skin from the wear of daylight.

The years have also taken from them all remnants of a word for 'fugitive', or 'explorer', or even 'conqueror' (that last one remains as a gust within the labyrinth's walls, one the woman would not dare to give breath to even if she had sounds for it). Their language eroded, leaving bare traces of emotions and intents growing on their bones while the wind howls in the cracks. It leaves space for new ideas, this void, so that 'water' is a leftover of an old tongue, a starting point, but the protection granted by water, the tide that breaks and leaves a clarity of mind that is devoid of fog, the tranquility of rocking waves and the depths they belie, tracing a circle around them, protecting them, this all becomes a new sound, then refined into a hum, a stare, a shrug. They are in this together.

 

 

 

**Lizard**

The cliffs slope into a moorland miles to the north and to the west, a testament to their resolve and a blessing to their dwindling provisions, lifting their barren curtain on grey skies and a makeshift homing beacon, a distant trail of smoke rising to the clouds. A witness is required to seal the momentuous landing, as water can't be trusted to hold its promises and the gulls have grown wary of the two travellers: fate provides a lizard, soaking up what little warmth is left from a rock on the far end of the beach.

They proceed as ghosts.

 

 

 

**Wander**

Solitude is measured in the stillness of her sleep, scaled along the inches of the rising and falling of each breath. The glow that flickers under her skin shifts, forming new patterns. Were there always currents underneath?

Wander has committed to his memory all the new terms of this second existence, from the very first cry that brought him back to the world, resonating under the shrine's high dome, as freezing water corroded the darkness that had taken refuge in every cell of his skin. He would still, under limited circumstances, call himself a man, if only to spite those cowhearted spinners of lies who set a thick web upon the sword, the land and the power within. Life was dull, up North, and they needed their peace. His horns broke through.

He, then, is human. This certainty is stronger under sunlight, where he can check over and over that his shadow's business entails nothing more than following in his wake. Whatever doubts may rise at night, he has learned to cast them aside, and to keep them at bay by swearing on his own horns, which are authority enough, for a man with no church nor gods.

But she is consumed. There is so little precious earth left on her bones, as if one could not expect to tear her away from the passing of time and keep a modicum of soil under her feet. An odd conclusion for his struggles, and why should he accept this one when death did not ring final enough to his ears?

There are no endings. What he cannot find, the cliffs that rise at every new turn of their horizon are keeping from him. Worried, but not desperate, he seeks a hint, a tale, a warning he can trample to save her again. There are no words under the heather's roots. They interrogate moss, but its answers are too feeble. In the end he carves his own vow in squiggles on tree bark, that they will find soil, they will find the background chattering of people, they will find a fate for her. They will find, and this is important, they will find water to drown her smoke in.

 

 

 

**Fakro**

The first soul to cross paths with them is a mother of one, an easy match, it seems, for the aging woman's plight in travelling alone with a taciturn son. Compassion comes quick, along with the offer of sharing bread and a tale or two – the aging woman and her companion have no tales mortals can share and no words to tell them, so they offer berries and cured fish.

She is not learned, but she is a weaver, wise of a lifetime spent following her elders' patterns, and her eyes are fixed on the young man's tabard. The symbols he wears are dense and tattered, hiding under salt and mud, within their own borders, leaving few doors open for a reading. So many shadows – black tendrils slowly stretching.

Compassion washes away. They part.

 

 

 

**Sera**

The pebble keeps falling in the shaman's dreams. A land cracks opens, throwing black streams beyond its coast; those currents gain momentum and volume, banishing the sea. Freed from water, they dry. They are now meanderous, dusty paths, headed toward a center that is clouded from the shaman's sight. A luminous figure urges them on, glowing lines flickering under her skin, turning the colour of a sickly winter sky.

The landslide knocks at her door, jerking her awake, and her maiden tells her that a woman and a man are waiting at the gate.

The shaman asks for the strangers to be brought to her, as the first step of the village's hospitality.

Mono will not be judged again. They leave.

 

 

 

**Temet**

A boy listens to cries in the woods' clearing. The story he makes up for his friends, words already whirling and chaining together in his brain as he gasps for air, running to the safety of his home, is the stuff of fairy tales, and a warrior will come to rescue the fair woman. Even then, a damp bleak mood sweeps in half way and he cannot bring himself to give them a happily ever after.

Had he been able to understand the voice, he would have altogether held his peace:

“It was not I who chose to come”, the woman confided to a polished stone, moss growing on one side. “We should have stayed.” “I followed along the landslide.” “In the paths, in the paths, the shadow grows closer around the corners.” “I am smoke.”

 

 

 

**Unara**

A net of shadows has been thrown across the woods. A night sufficed: where yesterday were blades of grass, today hovers a thick fog, spreading from a single line close to the most beaten of the paths. The Witch of the Chestnut crooks her bark-like back to inspect a small gust of it for herself and cannot say what manner of fracture brought it about, only that it is a rift, a leak, pus from a wound carrying fresh infection that her trees cannot fight back. They cannot see or feel it, it is her duty to collect symbols that trees have little use for – but then, trees have their own ways of being careless. Men moreso.

She builds labyrinths of her own, fleeting, made of twigs, channeling the miasma to the strongest oaks to give the others respite, but the trail continues beyond her frontline of birches, on the dusty road where feet and hooves will press this curse into the ground, let it drip to seeds and plants that man and beast will eat. The land, she fears, will not recover.

 

(She is right, but she is long dead by the time the first horned child is born)

 

 

 

**Mono**

The island bathes in the sunlight; distant hills, coated in grey.

This, she knows, this is their end, the center of her labyrinth, that has spanned out of the folds of her brain to cover a land whole, this is a seal, a ward, a circle of water surrounding her (and him. He is with her always, which is nice). Their escape ended within borders smaller than their cage, from a land chiselled away from maps and legends to a dot no cartographer has ever cared for. She will care. She will stand and say: this land is important. It is hers, and his, and nobody else's. Except in claiming that she blinks and there is the shadow in the corner of her eye, in the angle between a high rock and the distant coastline, or in a different space between the smell of fresh tea herbs and the curve of a cow's horns, soon disappearing under other thoughts.

 

Water may not be enough. They will build walls.


End file.
